Study on the Transformation Process of Thyroid Fine-Needle Aspiration Liquid-Based Cytology to Whole-Slide Image.

Objective: Analyse and summarise the reasons for failure in the digital acquisition of thyroid liquid-based cytology (LBC) slides and the technical challenges, and explore methods to obtain reliable and reproducible whole digital slide images for clinical thyroid cytology.

Method: Use the glass slide scanning imaging system to acquire whole-slide image (WSI) of thyroid LBC in sdpc format through different. Statistical analysis was conducted on the different acquisition methods, the quality of the glass slides, clinical and pathological characteristics of the case, TBSRTC grading and the quality of WSI.

Results: The WSI obtained by different scanning methods showed a high level of consistency in quality (W = 0.325, p < 0.001), especially between fully automatic scanning with different focus densities (W = 0.9, p < 0.001). A total of 2114 images were obtained through different methods of multi-layer fusion and multi-point focusing scanning, with scan success rates of 100.0%, 100.0%, 100.0% and 23.6%, respectively. The correlation between the quality of thyroid LBC glass slides and the image quality of thyroid LBC WSI was statistically significant (p < 0.001). The correlation between TBSRTC grading and the quality of thyroid LBC digital WSI was statistically significant (p < 0.001).

Conclusions: Although the quality of glass slides has a significant impact, the success rate and image quality of malignant tumour scanning are both high. Overall, the risk of missed diagnosis of malignant tumours is low. In the future, we also need to improve the performance and algorithm of the scanner in cases of sparse cells.